Response times start when the call comes in to dispatch for us

It may not be a big deal - I am not making excuses. We are a volunteer fire company - this is what I have noticed.

In our situation - the call comes into dispatch and is immediately logged as the start time of the incident. Our dispatchers are fairly good but some times it takes several minutes before they can ascertain what the call is and what is needed. There have been documented times where it takes up to 4 minutes to calm folks down and figure out the emergency.

This four minutes is still clock time that our fire company needs to make up. Our times are not from tones going out on the pager but when the call enters dispatch and is answered.

Seems like a nit - but if the 6 minutes are critical to measure lets look at the process and not a knee jerk reaction that it is all on the FD.

We record the time the call is received and also the time the call is dispatched on our records. I don't think it is unreasonable to include the time elapsed from when it is received until it is dispatched into the total response time. If nothing else, it forces us to look at the dispatch center when we are trying to address response times. If your weak link is in the dispatcher, then you need to address ways to improve their ability to effectively dispatch calls. On the other hand, if there is a complaint on your response time, and the delay was because of a problem the dispatcher had trying to get adequate dispatch information, you will be able to document that as well.

Yes there are factors such as call processing, turnout and travel for volunteers to the station, etc.

Like someone else stated we have 5 columns on our cad sheet. Initial Call, Dispatched, Enroute, On Location, Clear so we are fortunate that if there is an issue with a specific call we can go look at all the times and see where the longest gap was. Was it in processing by the dispatcher(Initial Call vs. Dispatched time)? Was it long turnout time getting to the station and crewed up or was it simply long travel time from the station to the incident location?

For us having these multiple times lets us do a little analysis and see where our response time issues lie and as a matter of fact it has also got us on the Town's agenda with regards to a sub-station to drop the times even further and it has us in an automatic aid agreement witha neighboring dept for one section of town just based on sheer travel distance. Without good data that is able to be analyzed, we wouldn't have had a leg to stand on for either argument we would have simply been criticized by a 911 caller... "It took FOREVER for the FD to get here"

Yeah, and they always say "I CALLED THIRTY MINUTES AGO - WHAT TOOK THEM SO LONG!" Time really flies when you are waiting for the fire department of the bus to arrive. They don't know or think that we have time stamps on all dispatches and apparatus radio traffic.

We just do the best we can to calm them down. I can bring all the data on any dispatch on the MDC's on any of the apparatus or chiefs vehicles to show any one the times.

like the rest we.......

record the time of the initial call, the time of dispatch, time enroute, etc. we can then look at each "component" individually and see if there is a problem.

in some cases there has been "extreme" amounts of time between initial call and dispatching that were easily explained by the fact that a)the caller was hysterical, b)the caller was at a different location, c)etc, etc, etc. had we not recorded each time the responding FD would have had to explain "what took you so long?" when it really wasn't their fault.

I was going to say "and this is different how?" The golden hour starts when the incident occured. If it takes a long time for someone to call 911 then the patient suffers. Also we know how callers are when they call for help. Seconds seem like minutes and minutes seem like hours. In reality the vast majority of callers are pretty calm when they call. I think it's less then 10% are hysterical when calling 911. It's usually those frantic callers that raise the stress level up 352%, but most dispatchers are trained to calm down the caller and that does take time. This is needed since there have been several incidents where the caller gave a wrong address because they are nervous and frantic.

If it takes dispatch more then 4 minutes on a regular basis to find out what is the emergency then that's a problem. It should be figured out in the first 30 seconds if fire, ems or police are needed.